Answer Ki-43 Hayabusa (Oscar) 1:33 / finished

Hi all,
during another break from my thunderbolt (seems like it's an endless work ), I've decided to build something which would be quick and not too complicated - a shortrun, simply said. My choice was a model from Lukasz Fuczek, published by Answer - japanese Nakajima Ki 43 Hayabusa, flown by Maj. Tateo Kato, leader of 64th Sentai of JAAF in east Asia war until he was shot down by british Blenheim gunner sgt. McLuckie on May 22, 1942.

I've started on beginning of March; you can see my progress so far below.

RE: Answer Ki-43 Hayabusa (Oscar) 1:33

the fuselage - the chipping will need to be repainted a little bit in later stage; it was printed in metallic colour, which turned gray after varnishing, so I've highlighted it with a mix of silver aluminum paint and glossy varnish (both acrylic), but I will have to do it at least once more during finishing touch-ups.

RE: Answer Ki-43 Hayabusa (Oscar) 1:33

the tail - the sheetmetal parts between horizontal and vertical stabilizers still missing, will be done later. On the second image you can see bottom part of horizontal stabilizers; I've tried to raise the middle parts of panels with a mix of silver and varnish again...

now I'm working on the engine, it has 14 cylinders, which I find to be a little too much; front ones are done already anyway (except for the valve rods, wiring and several more details, which will be done when the cylinders are on their place on engine)...
so this is it so far, I'd like to finish it in another three or four weeks, so we will see...

ok, 3 more to go! :yahoo:
I hope I haven't overdone the weathering - it's not so contrasting in real as on the photos...

and by the way, if someone of you builds this model someday - a warning for you: if I'm not absolutely wrong, 7 pieces of parts for cylinder heads are missing (parts 53a, 53b and 53c); it's not a real problem, it can be photocopied easily (which I did), but it's better to notice BEFORE you cut all these tiny parts...

I am thinking about making the panel on the left side of cowling open like it was on real plane - I can send some pictures when I get home.
I want to avoid removing the whole cowling, because there's nothing behind the firewall or whatever the partition just behind the engine is and I don't want to scratchbuild everything behind it...
Well we will see, I need to doublecheck the construction of the cowling...

a short update - wheel wells. Hayabusa's wheel wells are quite simple, so here they are. I decided to add quite heavy weathering - according to the chipping, the plane has already seen some service, so it would be strange if the wells were clean and shining. I also added the brake cable and that round hatches - they were printed on the wall, but the print was almost invisible.
Since the wall of the well follows the wing profile, it was a little tricky to shape it, so time will show if I did it right - when placing them into the wing I'm quite curious about the result, the wells look really ugly alone.

hi sparrowhawk,
what an idea!
how many do you know of so far? and if the same type of airplane was published several times by different publishers, do you want to have all of them or just one kit for one plane?

Rufe was published by Nowe Modele
There is also N1K2-J Shiden Kai published by Kojinsha.
Kancho Iliev designed N1K1 Kyofu, Ki-100 Goshikisen and Nakajima Ki-87 - all thre are available as PDF in 1:48 scale.
P-Model has electronic Shinden, Rufe, Zero 21 and Zero 52, all in 1:32 scale
List is rather large but we are stealing the show from beautiful Hayabusa :rotwerd:

Hi Yu-san,
I've already found these videos, but thank you for posting them - they're really interesting. As far as I know, most of footage comes from wartime propaganda movie about 64th sentai (parts of which can be found e.g. on dailymotion.com, searching for kato hayabusa, but they're not subtitled), but it still shows very nice in-flight scenes. And the song is kinda catchy, too

As for the model, I'm working on the wings now, so I suppose I will post some shots tomorrow when I have something to show except for cut parts

Hi all,
let's continue with promised shots with the wings on their place - there's still a lot of work to do; so far I've done wing-fuselage sheets on the right side only, especially the front part is tricky like hell - but applause to Lukasz Fuczek, designed flawlessly for such a complicated shape. The white-blue strip is a little bit off, which is definitely my fault, but I noticed it too late - maybe I'll try to fix it somehow later.
And by the way, the wheel wells look much better when placed into the wing imho...

and now for something completely different
after shaping huge parts of wings' skin, I needed some rest, so i did some detail work - landing light and the carburettor intake.
The light was done in the same manner as on my Sturmovik (bubble from the wrapping foil), so not much to say.
As for the intake, I wanted to test an idea which I got some time ago for modelling various protective meshes and here's the result - I think it's quite satisfactory. So - the chequered paper from the inside of cigarette pack does the trick - it's the silver one with embossed pattern of small squares. All I did was drybrushing it from the silver side with black paint, so that only the recessed lines remained silver - voila, that's it. Then I just CA-ed the protective bars from thin lead wire and drybrushed with silver. If you have any comments about the result, please share them.

oh well.
some more progress: the dirty job on cowling is finished, now it waits for varnishing, highligting the chiping with mix of glossy varnish and silver paint and overall cleaning and finishing.
I needed to modify the fuselage-engine section because of my intention to build the cowling with the cover removed. As you can see on my primitive sketch, the problem is that either the partition which is placed right behind the engine would be visible in the opening or the gap between fuselage and cowling would be too big. After some thinking and some tests, raw power was used to change the shape of the whole fillet dramatically, thus gaining about 5 mm needed. The cowling itself is reinforced by a wire ring just in front of the partition - it even corresponds with original plane, where some kind of pipe was used. The segments of the cowling were glued edge-to-edge (without glue tabs) using a chloroprene glue - it's easy to work with, but it probably wasn't optimal choice for this case; I failed to make the inside smooth because of blobs of glue and since the chloroprene glue remains elastic a little bit, it's impossible to sand - well, nevermind.

and by the way:
@everyone: thanks for comments and kind words.
@Martin: I'm afraid that my english is far from being perfect, but thanks for appreciation. My most important teacher was probably my ZX Speccy some 20 years ago... Left, right, jump and fire was enough for most of them, but I started to like more complicated ones and there my interest for english language begun...

I was so curious about the result that I couldn't resist making a small composition - it's all a dry fit, the white oil cooler is a "placeholder" (I needed to know how much will I need to shift the engine forward) and the spinner is considered an alpha build

last update for today (it's time for some :prost: ) - rebuilt oil cooler.
It's made of 0.3 mm lead wire glued onto a cigarette paper, painted with revell 92 and washed dark with a mix of acrylic varnish and the brown-black-orange "dirt" from my watercolours. I really hate that revell brass paint - it's a synthetic enamel and it's not very good for brush (euphemism )...
nothing is glued together yet, so it might be a little crooked...

next to the engine, you can see selection of various paper rings and cylinders that I used as helpers.